The Liftoff report, which analyzed data gathered between June 2016 and June 2017, categorized app subscriptions into low-cost monthly subs ($0.99 to $7), medium ($7 to $20), and high-cost subs ($20 to $50), while also factoring the cost of acquisition per customer. The company found that apps in the medium price range had the highest conversion rate — 7.16 percent — and the lowest cost to acquire a subscriber, at just over $106 dollars. This was five times higher than the rate of people who subscribed to apps when the apps were in the low-cost category.

Google’s consumer-facing chat application Allo, a successor of sorts to Gchat, is today available on the web for desktop users. The service, which lets you chat with friends while taking advantage of features like stickers, “smart replies” for one-tap responses, and Google Assistant integration, among other things, has been in the works for some time.

“Travis embodied (and in some cases taught) me these things,” he wrote in a Facebook post in the hours after Kalanick’s resignation. “There wasn’t a moment or a minuscule detail that he noticed that he didn’t immediately spring into action to help me solve — with that wry smile and enthusiastic glint in his eye. The cost of losing him as Uber’s CEO will be incalculable.”

Apple Inc. AAPL +0.25% has set a budget of roughly $1 billion to procure and produce original content over the next year, according to people familiar with the matter—a sign of how serious the iPhone maker is about making a splash in Hollywood.

While this year’s Pixel XL successor widely rumored to be manufactured by LG, the smaller Pixel is expected to be again made by HTC. Recent leaks points to the device looking near identical to the current phone, with the same thick bezels remaining. There is now more proof of the HTC made nature of the device, as well as its features, thanks to a new FCC filing.

Lastly, to confirm the Milky Way results, the team put little cardboard hats on the study beetles’ heads, blocking their view of the sky. Those beetles just rolled around and around aimlessly, according to the study, published recently in the journal Current Biology.

The company began accepting orders on Facebook in June, and the feature was an instant hit: Hundreds of orders flowed in during the first few hours. In all forms, digital orders now make up over 60 percent of Papa John’s sales.

It’s the largest gift of Microsoft shares that Gates, 61, has made since 2000. He gave away $16 billion worth of the stock in 1999 and $5.1 billion a year later, according to calculations by Bloomberg.

Lattner announced the news on Twitter on Monday, saying he will start next week. His arrival at Mountain View, California-based Google comes after a brief stint as head of the automated driving program at Tesla Inc., which he left in June. Lattner made a name for himself during a decade-plus career at Apple Inc., where he created the popular programming language Swift.

Much of the information available is outdated and now incorrect. There was a time when launchd – second only in importance to the kernel – controlled and orchestrated most of the services supplied in macOS. Now a large proportion of them are scheduled and dispatched by two systems, DAS and CTS, which are barely even mentioned in Apple’s latest developer documentation, a busy part of macOS which doesn’t even appear to have a name.

I’m afraid that there is no glimmer of light that Apple intends to change this situation. Indeed, with the next major release of macOS making its way through its last beta releases, there is a good chance that it will soon get even worse when we have to contend with the foibles of APFS and many other changes.

“We know that if an adversary has control over the data a computer is processing, it can potentially take over that computer,” says Tadayoshi Kohno, the University of Washington computer science professor who led the project, comparing the technique to traditional hacker attacks that package malicious code in web pages or an email attachment. “That means when you’re looking at the security of computational biology systems, you’re not only thinking about the network connectivity and the USB drive and the user at the keyboard but also the information stored in the DNA they’re sequencing. It’s about considering a different class of threat.”

The Revvl is only sold by T-Mobile, and there's no other branding. Tmo isn't coming out and saying who built the hardware, but a previously leaked manual seems to point to Alcatel as the culprit. The phone has a 5.5-inch HD (presumably 720p) display, a 13MP camera, a MediaTek MT6738 SoC, a 3,000 mAh battery, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and Android 7.0 Nougat. There's even a fingerprint sensor around back.

It estimates Microsoft’s laptops and tablets will experience breakage rates of 25% within two years of ownership, loosely defined as any issue that comes up that prevents the computer from working as the owner expects.

Using Instagram data from 166 individuals, we applied machine learning tools to successfully identify markers of depression. Statistical features were computationally extracted from 43,950 participant Instagram photos, using color analysis, metadata components, and algorithmic face detection. Resulting models outperformed general practitioners’ average unassisted diagnostic success rate for depression. These results held even when the analysis was restricted to posts made before depressed individuals were first diagnosed. Human ratings of photo attributes (happy, sad, etc.) were weaker predictors of depression, and were uncorrelated with computationally-generated features. These results suggest new avenues for early screening and detection of mental illness.

Taking steps against tasteless cartoons, or loose talk, such as the discussion of whether there are any psychological or behavioral differences between the sexes in the now famous Google memo, is perceived as cheaper and safer than facing a lawsuit later.

Now, just as two decades ago, many outsiders look at a firing-over-speech and say it's just a private firm's decision. No public policy or First Amendment implications, right?

And it's true that sometimes an employer's decision to fire would have been made even with no legal thumb on the scale. The disruption caused by an instance of speech, or co-workers' or managers' dislike for it, would have been enough. Other times legal considerations did make the difference. Hard to tell the two cases apart!

The problem is the advice ended up largely incorrect, Mr. Burr says. Change your password every 90 days? Most people make minor changes that are easy to guess, he laments. Changing Pa55word!1 to Pa55word!2 doesn’t keep the hackers at bay.

This includes a study that analyzed the exact same brain data from the original study and found that the sex of a given brain could be correctly identified with 69-per-cent to 77-per-cent accuracy.

Of course, differences exist at the individual level, and this doesn’t mean environment plays no role in shaping us. But to claim that there are no differences between the sexes when looking at group averages, or that culture has greater influence than biology, simply isn’t true.

In fact, research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy.

But love or hate the memo, which makes a number of substantive claims, some of which I regard as wrongheaded (and which would’ve benefitted greatly from an editor with more emotional intelligence than the author to help him avoid alienating his audience, even if he was determined to raise all of the same arguments), the many characterizations of the memo as “anti-diversity” are inaccurate.

“The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender,” Mr. Pichai wrote. “Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being ‘agreeable’ rather than ‘assertive,’ showing a ‘lower stress tolerance,’ or being ‘neurotic.’”

CEO Bob Iger told CNBC's Julia Boorstin Disney had a "good relationship" with Netflix, but decided to exercise an option to move its content off the platform. Movies to be removed include Disney as well as Pixar's titles, according to Iger. Netflix said Disney movies will be available through the end of 2018 on its platform. Marvel TV shows will remain.

Trump has definitely used his Twitter account as an official platform. The White House confirmed that his tweets are official statements, and it’s preserving them as public presidential communications. However, it’s much less clear that it counts as a public forum, or that being prevented from viewing or participating in a Twitter thread chills free speech. Users can still view tweets by logging out or creating a new account, and as First Amendment lawyer and blogger Ken White told Vox, a successful lawsuit could make it difficult for any official Twitter account to block trolls or spammers without worrying about legal action.

The global team will be led by Founding Partners Dror Berman, Rick Scanlon, Scott Brady and Yuval Shachar. Additionally, Eric Schmidt will be a co-founder, a non-managing member and the anchor LP. They are joined by Partners Liat Aaronson and Ziv Kop.

A two-person live stream proved to be both a product and technical challenge. The Live team had to figure out how both people would appear onscreen. Instead of using the FaceTime model, which makes one caller appear much smaller, Instagram wanted to make the broadcast a split screen since they envision these streams to be an equal back and forth between two people. Sarkar says this is something influencers have been asking for, as a way to communicate more directly and openly with fans.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday said in an email to employees that, while he supports free expression by company workers, Damore’s memo crossed the line of the company’s code of conduct “by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” Pichai added that he was cutting short a family vacation overseas to address staff in a town hall Thursday.

“To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK,” Pichai wrote.

The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.

The incident highlights Trump’s penchant for off-the-cuff tweeting — and the potential consequences for doing so now that he holds the nation’s highest office. Even as the president has railed against multiple investigations into Russia’s meddling in U.S. politics, he may have become Exhibit A of the foreign government’s influence by elevating a suspected Russia-connected ­social-media user — part a sophisticated campaign to exacerbate disputes in U.S. politics and gain the attention of the most powerful tweeter in the world.

A year after taking up the case, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled in favor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its challenge against podcasting patent troll, Personal Audio. The decision is a massive relief for the vibrant and ever-growing medium, which has been operated under the threat of lawsuit for a number of years.

YouTube today rolled out the ability to share videos with contacts directly in its mobile app for Android and iOS. Users can chat about shared videos using text, react with emoji, like messages with a heart, reply with other videos, and invite more friends to the conversation (up to a maximum of 30 people per group message).

When reached for comment about its branding strategy, Amazon did not have an explicit answer, but a spokesperson confirmed the following brands are indeed Amazon’s: “Amazon has a range of brands including Amazon Basics, Happy Belly, Mama Bear, Pinzon, Presto!, Wickedly Prime, Goodthreads, Amazon Essentials, Mae, Ella Moon, Buttoned Down, The Fix and Lark & Ro.”

Our tipster reports that there's no 3.5mm headphone jack (sigh!), but the phone definitely looks like it has stereo speakers on the front. The in-hand feel was reportedly better than the original Pixel, sleek and elegant.

We have always taken a security-first approach to technology here at Blockstream, and commend exchanges for doing likewise. Exchanges are the operational end of Bitcoin infrastructure, with billions of dollars under technical management. In Bitcoin Cash, keys controlling ownership of coins are shared with real Bitcoin investments totaling $50 billion. Sharing those Bitcoin keys with untested software in order to claim a Bitcoin Cash gift is highly risky—maybe too risky.

The hackers claim it took six months to break into HBO’s network, and that they spend $500,000 a year purchasing so called zero-day exploits that let them break into networks through holes not yet known to Microsoft and other software companies.

James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote the note, confirmed his dismissal in an email, saying that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.” He said he’s “currently exploring all possible legal remedies.”

While Mr. Kalanick isn’t currently pursuing a shareholder battle, also known as a proxy fight, and hasn’t asked the people whom he contacted to sign documents to give him their voting power, he hasn’t ruled out the possibility, said a different person briefed about the matter. Over the past three years, Mr. Kalanick has obtained such voting power from around 100 current and former Uber employees, this person said.

“I am now sharing that there is situation related to gathering of UAS-related information that has been ongoing for a length of time. It involves the use of DJI drones to collect audio, visual and telemetry data on all flights across the Globe. The details shared here are perhaps known to a limited number of the worldwide owners and users of the DJI technology. I feel that this sort of knowledge is something that every UAS pilot and every person/company/agency needs to understand related to your aerial missions.”

However, where LastPass Premium previously cost $12/year, it’s being doubled to $24/year. While all existing features are still available with Premium (sharing, emergency access, advanced multi-factor authentication options, 1GB of encrypted storage, and more), nothing new is being added to justify the price hike.

Steam, the preeminent “app store” for PC games, now counts 67 million monthly active players. That’s more than the 53 million monthly active users Microsoft reported for Xbox Live last quarter. Steam also has 33 million daily active players. (Apart from monthly active users, Steam’s total user base is much larger: Valve reported 125 million total active lifetime users last year.)

Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL 0.58% Google has been in discussions with several publishers, including Vox Media, CNN, Mic, the Washington Post and Time Inc., TIME 1.48% to participate in the project, which is dubbed “Stamp,” the people say. It could be announced as early as next week, one of the people said.

Austin’s transportation director, Robert Spillar, is working to prepare the city. But earlier this year, a realization hit him about what driverless cars might mean for his budget. “It struck me,” he says. “Half my revenue for transportation capacity and operations improvements is based on a parking model that may be obsolete in a dozen years.”

. In effect, the government treats the selling of the malware as a use of the malware to damage a computer. It’s saying Hutchins and X conspired (formed an agreement) to send off the program (distributing it to the buyer) intending to cause damage (eventually, albeit indirectly, when the buyer later used it to cause damage).

I have never seen Section 1030(a)(5)(A) used that way before. And for the charge to fit the statute, the government has to prove two things that it may or may not be able to prove.

Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.

Apple Inc. is planning to release a version of its smartwatch later this year that can connect directly to cellular networks, a move designed to reduce the device’s reliance on the iPhone, people familiar with the matter said.

But talk is cheap, so Facebook is going to factor speed into its News Feed algorithm, just like Google does with its search algorithm. Specifically, the social giant will soon “take into account the estimated load time of a webpage that someone clicks to from any link in News Feed on the mobile app.”

In terms of its imaging capabilities, Note8 has two main rear cameras, both featuring 12-megapixel sensors. But the primary, wide-angle one has an f1.7 aperture and dual-pixel autofocus, while the telephoto lens is f2.4 and enables a 2x optical zoom. Both lenses are optically stabilized. The user-facing selfie cam on the front features an eight-megapixel sensor and an f1.7 autofocus lens.

"It seems as if people overestimated the mining power, or the support from miners — hence, it is taking far longer than most expected," Iqbal Gandham, the UK managing director at the social investment network eToro, said in a statement sent to Business Insider just before the split.

Cook rebuffed the parallel that some have drawn to last year, when Apple refused an FBI request to turn over customer information. Cook said in that case US law was on Apple's side, whereas in the recent VPN case China's laws require companies that want to offer VPN apps to get a license from the government.

Microsoft’s new subscription program, called Surface Plus, will be available starting later today through the Microsoft Store in person and online. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop, Surface Pro, Surface Book and Surface Studio are all options under the program. The program lets participants upgrade to a new machine after 18 months when they return their existing hardware in good condition.

"Services revenue hit an all-time quarterly record of $7.3 billion, representing 22 percent growth over last year. We continue to see great performance all around the world, with double-digit growth in each of our geographic segments. Over the last 12 months, our services business has become the size of a Fortune 100 company, a milestone we've reached even sooner than we had expected."

A day after Pinterest rolled out an update that put its visual search feature in the front-and-center of its app, Google announced it, too, is giving its visual search engine an upgrade. The company is today updating Image Search with a new feature that aims to connect web users with more than just a list of photos, as before – its results will also now highlight when there’s more to discover from the image in question. For example, it will inform you if there’s a recipe available or if the photo is of something you can buy, among other things.

In the company’s lengthy response, it argued that showing growth was more important than showing the number. In fact, Twitter said, showing the number of DAUs would invite unfair comparison to Facebook, which calculates its number including people who use its separate Facebook messaging application. “Investors would not be able to compare performance between the Company and this other company,” San Francisco-based Twitter wrote. Facebook has six times the number of monthly users as Twitter.

Specifically, the bill would “exempt cybersecurity researchers engaging in good-faith research from liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when in engaged in research pursuant to adopted coordinated vulnerability disclosure guidelines,” according to a statement released by Sen. Warner (link added).

Featuring a laptop-sized touchscreen, the device represents a new product category and could be announced as soon as next spring’s F8 developer conference, according to people familiar with the matter. They say the large screen and smart camera technology could help farflung people feel like they’re in the same room, which aligns with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s mission of bringing Facebook users closer together. The device is in the prototype phase but is already being tested in people’s homes.

The new funding round, the company’s largest ever, should expedite a number of internal product and business efforts, including a redesign of its homepage and its first foray into user-uploaded video, Huffman added in an interview with Recode.

The money comes courtesy of a number of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and individual investors like Y Combinator President Sam Altman (also a board member) and SV Angel’s Ron Conway. It also includes money from the hedge fund Coatue, investment firm Vy Capital and mutual fund giant Fidelity.

Most years, the new iPhone launches in late September, with a nice, big launch weekend or two of shipments to end the quarter. This year, however, there’s buzz that the anticipated super-high-end flagship iPhone might not launch until October or later, and could ship in limited quantities.

Google's own Pixel phone is a case study on how to use computational photography to reach new heights in mobile imaging. The Pixel's HDR+ mode, in development while Gundotra was still as Google as part of the Gcam project, is the very thing he claims Android can't do because of its various limitations. The same applies to multi-frame photography on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and HDR Boost on the HTC U11: computational photography is more than alive and well on Android, it is thriving.

More details about Apple’s upcoming iPhone have been uncovered in HomePod’s firmware — which runs iOS like the iPhone — revealing features including a tap to wake function, facial expression and attention detection, and the long-rumored removal of the home button. Apple accidentally released the firmware over the weekend resulting in a frenzy of analysis about previously unknown features.

Apple and Google have removed hundreds of financial trading apps from their app stores following an investigation suggesting that thousands of people may have been scammed – many of them seniors. Some have reportedly lost their entire life savings.

In a discussion topic on the MacRumors forums, Jackson shared a screenshot of his iTunes purchase history with the 2016 film Passengers listed as "Movie (4K, HDR)" under the Type column. However, he said iTunes only let him download the movie in HD quality, which is either 720p or 1080p depending on the content.

We think Apple is therefore committed to having LGD geared up for its OLED iPhone display business in 2018 as it seeks to reduce supply risks. Even though LGD may likely start off with minimal initial penetration in 2018 (we estimate no more than 4-6%), the effort, with the full commitment of both Apple and LGD, will help LGD mature during the process and steadily gain supply share from 2019 onward. This will in turn continuously boost Apple’s bargaining power on OLED prices.

United States district judge Lucy Koh has denied Apple's motion to dismiss a lawsuit related to disabling FaceTime on iOS 6 and earlier software versions three years ago, allowing the case to proceed as a class action lawsuit. MacRumors obtained court documents of the opinion filed electronically.

Featured celebrities will include Will Smith and James Corden; Miley, Noah, Billy Ray and the entire Cyrus family; Shakira and Trevor Noah; Game of Thrones stars Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams; Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith; John Legend, Alicia Keys and Taraji P. Henson; LeBron James and James Corden; and more.

One iOS developer has dug into the firmware and discovered that it also contains hints of what we can expect for other devices. Most importantly, the firmware includes numerous references to infrared face detection within the BiometricKit framework that is currently home to Touch ID authentication, supporting claims that the iPhone 8 will rely at least in part on facial recognition. Developer Steven Troughton-Smith has also confirmed these discoveries.

Pandora has certainly had an interesting second quarter, capping off the drama with CEO Tim Westergren stepping down at the end of June. It also sold Ticketfly at a pretty big loss, pondered selling a big stake in the company to private equity firm KKR with some weird terms and then finally took a massive $480 million investment from SiriusXM. An outright sale of Pandora, for now, seems off the table after some consideration and that massive investment.

Sansar’s open beta comes just days after another social VR platform, AltspaceVR, announced it was shutting down on August 3. That company had 35,000 users, but it ran out of money. Such is the nature of the VR market, which is taking off more slowly than people hoped. Sansar will still have plenty of rivals, such as Roblox, Facebook, and others.